Google Analytics Explained For Complete Beginners (2021)

Today, I’m show you how to use Google Analytics for new users.

In other words, I will assume that you’ve got zero knowledge about Google Analytics, you don’t know what it is, how to install Google Analytics into your website and the benefits for your business.
To find out more check out my video below or keep reading for the full blog.

So those are the fundamental things I want to explain to you in this video today. Now, what Google Analytics is, it’s a free tool from Google. It reports how much traffic your website is getting and where it is coming. – either from your Google Ads or Social media campaigns.

These are the types of things that Google Analytics will help you to understand. It will also help you to understand things like, what are the most popular pages of your website. What are the least most popular pages of your website. Today, I am going to do a step by step tutorial.

So what I recommend is, before signing up to a Google Analytics account, create a Gmail account. Once you’ve got a Google email account, it’s easy to use all the google facilities because they work so much more cohesively together.

Once you’ve done that, what you then need to do is set up a Google Analytics account. Now what I recommend is that for each business that you have set up a separate Google Analytics account. If you’ve got three different businesses, and rows separate, then set up three different business, three different Google Analytics account.

It will just help you to better manage your analytics. Once you created your Google your Gmail account, you simply go to analytics.google.com. You can simply click on start measuring. What you do first, is you give yourself an account name.

Now, this will typically be your company name here. Then you scroll down, this is up to you. If you’re a tech, these are not, I just find it helps to keep the technical support ticket in the account specialist tipped the benchmarking.

I’m not really a great fan of Okay, so then you click on Next. Now we give it the property name. This is what you will typically call your website. In this case, we’re just going to use an example website that I have here, called the impact group.

And I’m simply going to copy and paste it here. Take that the HTTP and so on, so that is nice and tidy. Absolutely. And then you simply choose the country that the business operates in, in this case, it’s going to be UK.

The time zone, so many choose United Kingdom, and the currency, British pounds. There you go, to do British Pound TV, oh, and then really importantly, do not miss this stage.

If you miss this stage, then you’re going to go back and after your normal work, they’ve got an option here called Show Advanced options. Click on this. Now let me explain to you what this is.

The current way that Google Analytics works, it uses something called a universal Universal Analytics property. And that’s been going on for many years, Google have now recently introduced the called Google Analytics

The latest way of installing Google Analytics. However, it misses a lot of features at the moment. Currently, even though it’s it’s good to have it, you’ll find that the old ua attacking the universal tracking works far better. I recommend you install both Universal Analytics and Google Google Analytics. I don’t know why Google Analytics is it hasn’t got Universal Analytics, enabled by default.

Once you click on the Show Advanced Options, you’ll see this box here, schools show this section here called create a universal property. And the right hand side of it, you’ll see this take, please enable this tech. Now what that means is now you will be installing, as well as Google Analytics for which is the latest Google and Linux platform.

You will also be installing the Universal Analytics, which is going to give you a far much more more detail than currently what Google antics forgives you. Once you tick that, it’s gonna ask you for your website address. You paste your website address here or type it in whichever you whichever you prefer.

Make sure you’ve got the website. It’s ideally it shouldn’t need to be HTTPS, can leave all this enabled, right? Because it’s now going to create both the Google index for and the Universal Analytics property. Then you simply click on Next.

It’s got some information here about your industry and so on. I’m gonna choose business here, it doesn’t really make much of a difference. What it is, this is more for Google and Google Analytics, own research information. And then you click on the Create button here. Okay, and he go past all the, the legal stuff. There we go, I want to choose UK, whereas UK there is ticking the box. And I accept, of course, we accept all this, don’t we? Yeah.

And then that’s it. So the Google Analytics account has now been created. Now, what I what I always recommend is that, if you’re non technical, just get your website developer to actually do this for you, right?

Because you as a business owner may not want to get all this sort of set up, you just want to see you know, what sort of traffic is coming to your website. A nice easy way is get your website developer to if you do this for you, or your marketing company. There are so many different ways in achieving the same goal.

But I want to show you the sort of ways that I use myself. Now that we have the analytics installed, the most important thing to remember here is this part, this part down here, this is your this is your Google Analytics for code. Which your developer or whoever is going to be putting this piece of code into your website will need to know about.

But you’re also going to be saying this, you. So default, it goes to your Google Analytics for property, but you can then also switch over to your Universal Analytics property. What you can do where then you can simply click on admin.

If you’ve got your tracking information tracking code, and it shows you your Universal Analytics tracking code here. Either install this directly to your website, or you can install something called Google Tag Manager. Install this piece of code within your website on every page of your website via Google Tag Manager, or simply by going inside your website itself.

If you’ve got a WordPress website, you can, there’s some plugins available to install the header and footer, header and body scripts. Likewise, with Shopify too, so you’d have to investigate depending on which platform you’re using.

But how to install the Google Analytics code into your website. What I finally recommend is before starting to use Google Analytics, get some goals configured. Get your web developer, or your marketing agency to configure goals.

Now, what you really want to do you want to measure things. You want to set goals, like for example, how many people are filled in your contact form? Or how many people have clicked on your phone number? Well, how many people have bought a product from you? Or how or what’s your revenue?

Then you can click on new goals here to configure your goals. Okay. It’s really important you do that? Because with this information, not only can see can you see what how many people are coming onto your website and where they’re coming from.

But you can see what are the tangible actions that they’ve taken, you know, how much revenue Have you made, how many people have contacted you how many people have made an appointment to see you and so on. So it’s really, really important you get these goals configured.

So once that’s done, then we can go inside your Google Analytics account and it started using it. Next, that’s exactly what we can do, I want to take you into Google Analytics. And we’ll show you that once your Google Analytics code has been installed, the type of information you can get from Google Analytics.

So once you log into your Google Analytics account, this is the type of dashboard that you typically see. You’ll see like a quick summary of how many users have been on a website, within a specific date period, in this case, less seven days, how much revenue generated your conversion rate in sessions, and how many visitors on your website at the moment, and so on, it’s got hold on a wealth of information here.

If you just want to quickly get a quick glance, at a quick glimpse of your of your traffic, this is the place to come to right that you know, where all your traffic is coming from users, you know, how are people coming onto your website. These are the 18th and 19th, the 20th, you know, the hours of the day. So what are the busiest times of the day that your website is being used, what pages people are visiting the most frequently, and so on.

Now I’m going to take you through some of the most common options that I use on a sort of day to day basis. Now I want to keep this really simple, Google entities can get very complicated, and there’s a lot of information that you can get from this.

But for the purpose of this video, this is a simple beginners video to Google Analytics, just so that you can get into it. And just so that you can get a feel about what type of information you can get from Google Analytics about the people that are visiting your website. So the first section is real time. And if you click on real time, click on overview.

And if you click on here, this shows you at this moment in time, how many people are on your website. So it gives you a lot more information, it tells you the top active pages. This is recently, one of the one of the most popular pages that people are looking at when they’re on your website, okay, and generally shows a graph of where they’re actually coming from, as well.

So this is really good to know, just to see that you know, what sort of demand you’ve got for your website. And so and, you know, if you click into, say, locations, it gives you just the information. So at this point in time, this is where all is coming from, and this is the number of users, you got a new website, okay. And then you wait audiences.

Now, I find this absolutely fascinating, right? It’s really important to understand what type of users are visiting your website, you know, who are your audiences, what are the age ranges, you know, where they coming from, and so on. This is what audience gives you gives you some insights about the people that are visiting your website, you can then use that information to tailor your marketing, even your marketing messages, your ad, copy any advertisements that you have.

So on your targeting, there’s a whole wealth of information that you can use by understanding your audiences that are visiting your website. if you click on overview, and the audience, again, it tells you how many how many users on your website, and this is obviously within this date, period, right.

You can always go to the top and change your date period. It’s like the less sort of seven days and I can amend that to say, less, less 30 days. And if I made it to the last 30 days, this then updates accordingly.

And it shows you the demographics, the the type of system that they’re using, what, whether using a mobile, and what languages their browser is currently set to. What you can do, you can go into more information, you can click on demographics, and go over here.

It shows you by this is now sorted by age range. You can see that the typical users for this website, most of them are in the age of 25 to 34. Okay, and 65 Plus. There’s very few people within that age range, you can either click on just age range here. It gives you more information about the age range, but it’s actually broken down this time, right. So when it’s broken down, like if I look at say 18 to 18, so 2025 to 34, I can see that during the last 30 day period, which is specified over here. I’ve had top 1000 visitors visiting who are in the age range of 25 to 34.

Right, new users 11,000. So the strike list, basically what it means that some users are repeat visitors, right? hence there is a user that is a bit more than new users. Okay, well, I’m not gonna go into all of this information.

Otherwise, you know, we’ll be here for a very long time and I don’t want to sort of confuse you too much, but it’s got some basic information like bounce rate, rate, bounce rate is how many people are coming into website and exiting your website, straight away. Your page, your average session duration. Once people are on your website, how long do they stay on your website.

So over here, you can see that the age range 25 to 34, you’re staying on your website for an average of two minutes, and six seconds, and so on. Also, more importantly, it tells you the revenue that you’ve generated and how many sales you’ve generated. In this case, 28 sales from people who are 25, to 34, and 18 to 18,000 pounds worth of revenue.

And in this age range, we’ve got 25 visitors, and 20,000 pounds worth of revenue, and so on. Okay. So you can you can go into this, you can go to all these options, and it gives you a similar type of information like interest or this right. So if I call interests I can see what are the interests of the people that are visiting my website? Okay, so it’s the the affinity category in market audiences, and you can have a good read of this at your leisure.

I can also see what what country they’re coming from certificant, geo, and then location. I can see that, you know, most of them in this case are coming from UK, But I’ve got complete breakdown, and again, break down, not just in terms of how many people but what type of revenue we’re actually generating from these users. Which is more important, because it could be that from a certain country, you getting more visitors, but less revenue, right?

But wouldn’t it be great to target the people in the countries that have got may have slightly less visitors, but you’ve got more revenue, and so on. Okay. So that’s at a high level his audiences. Now I’m going to acquisitions, okay.

And this is how we’re getting the traffic to your website in the first place. So if you click on overview here, right, it shows you a very quick sort of dashboard of where your traffic is coming from. But I personally like to go to here, right? So sorry. So this is showing like paid paid search, organic traffic, and so on, right that where my traffic is coming from, but I like to go inside all traffic, and then channels.

If you can all traffic, then channels. And again, it gives you a similar table, saying that from paid search, how much how many visitors, I’m getting organic search, which is like SEO, direct visitors from what display campaigns, emails, and so on. And you can also again, see how much revenue you’ve generated from each one of these sources.

So from paid search, we’ve generated 110,000 pounds from organic, we’ve generated 82,000 pounds and so on, and, and the list just carries on. Okay, so then, again, so one of the ways that this is really useful is because you might be doing lots of different marketing, you might might be splashing on various different marketing channels.

You really want to understand where were you spending money and getting a lot, a lot of back in it was your return on investment, you ROI?

Where are you spending money, and you may not be getting your ROI on. So like over here, if I click on source medium, it gives you a bit more information. we know it’s from Google, but the medium is cost per click, in other words, Google ads or something like that, right?

Again, like Google and Google, organic, and so on. So just gives you a bit more information. If on the other hand, you’ve got a Google Ads campaign, then great, you can click on Google ads, and then campaigns. It shows you a list of all the campaigns and how many times how many clicks you’ve had, what is cost you for those campaigns, and what revenue you’re generating from each one of these campaigns.

Isn’t that absolutely brilliant? Yeah, you’ve got a wealth of information here. But then you can also go into other sort of information, like the hour of day that, you know, okay, so where what time of the day are generating most of my income.

In this case, look at this row, seven o’clock, I’m generating 4000 pounds, then nine o’clock on average, 5000, and so on. You can again, tailor your marketing campaigns, depending on the hour of the day that you’re generating more business, more revenue.

That’s acquisitions, then we’re going to go into behavior. behavior is when people are on your website, what, what I like to see is, okay, you’ve got your overview, which gives you a bit of a summary again, so every section has an overview of I like to go into a bit more detail.

You can click on one of my favorites is site content and vertical site content that all pages it shows me what are the most popular pages of a website. Okay, so the homepage is normally the most popular, but then I can see what’s the second most popular, I can order this I can see the second most popular, and also, you know how many unique visitors I’m getting from these pages and so on.

Again, by understanding what are the most popular pages on your website, you can then help you can tailor your marketing strategy to focus more of those pages to see what else we can do to generate more leads more sales and more conversions. Likewise, the pages that you see that are not so popular, what can we do to make them more popular?

It’s also got landing pages or landing pages, the difference between all pages and landing pages, landing pages where people come directly onto those pages. Okay, so these so did not go through different pages that come straight on to it from Google, or Bing or whatever, search engine, whatever source that you have. These are the pages and you can see what pages are being accessed directly.

Here’s an here’s a really good one exit pages. This is one of the most so people are coming up with these pages, but the exiting straightaway, right? This then for you to look at to say, Hey, why are people exiting these pages?

What can we do to keep these people on our website, as opposed to them exiting the website, and so on, and so on, and so on. You can also if you’ve got your search configured to the analytics, you can also see what are the search terms that people are typing in when they are on your website.

You might have a search box on your website. And you can see a whole list of searches that people are doing once they’re on your website. That’s behavior. And finally, we have conversions. Now, conversions will show you exactly that.

There’s a little bit of an overlap between the things I’ve shown you eight acquisitions and conversions. In acquisitions are showing you that Noni where a traffic is coming from, but how many conversions you’ve actually received here. So in other words, how many people have downloaded your guide, or how many people contact you, or the revenue that you’ve generated.

If we dig into conversions here, we’ve got a section here called conversions. And you can get a lot more information about what type of conversions your website is achieving. Obviously, like with all tabs, you first got an overview tab, which shows you just a quick overview of the amount of completions and everything else. It lists your specific goals.

But more importantly, if you if you’ve got an e commerce website, whereby you’re actually selling something online, this is really great. You can click on e commerce, overview, and then overview.

Then it shows you the revenue that they’ve generated your ecommerce conversion rate, how many sales or transactions you’ve had, and your what use the average order value.

And then it shows a lot more information about the types of products that you’ve been selling, and how much revenue they’ve generated. And you also got product performance. So if you click on product performance, it shows you what are your shows a list of your products? How should revenue they’ve generated? How many sales that generate. So in this case, this product here, generate four sales, and so on.

This is really great to see what selling and what type of revenue, a product is, bringing tea. So this is a really good, great section to to keep an eye on. So guys, again, it’s important that if you’re non technical, and you just want to get the report, it might be worthwhile.

You’re speaking to a specialist, your marketing agency or your web developer, to integrate the Google Analytics code for you and the tracking. And as well as the goals, it’s really important to set up the goals in Google Analytics so that you know for each thing that you want to measure, like what do you want to measure, you want to measure how many people have fill in your contact form, or how many people have download your boarding guides?

Well, how many people have bought a product from you, and what’s the value of the the products that they bought from you.

So in order to do that we need to set up as well as setting up the the tracking code, we need to set the goals. And it’s best done by a specialist, either your web developer or your marketing agency.